I had been on the fence about renewing my decade+ long Prime membership in a couple weeks. The only thing that was seriously tempting me to keep it was Prime Video.
I have mixed feelings already about Prime Video, as a watching experience I find it quite annoying because I'll find a movie I'd like to watch only to find I have to pay another $5 to watch it. With the other services, I know if a movie comes up on the display, I can watch it without further cost.
I'm fairly sensitive to adverts, I really don't like seeing them, largely because I've isolated myself from them. The fewer you see, the more unsettling they are, the blatant attractive factor of them, do.not.want. And anther $40/yr is too much.
Apparently, dropping Prime with the shopping really does not impact the speed of delivery or cost. I'm already often selecting delayed delivery. With the increased prices, it's hard to justify the $140/yr.
This seems to be the sad reality of many paid services: paying is not a guarantee of freedom from advertisement, only a temporary respite. Being a paying customer is a very juicy datapoint, one that every one of these streaming companies eventually decides to capitalize on.
The problem is: even at a higher price point, the ad-free versions generate less revenue.
"“We’re obviously trying with our pricing strategy to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier,” Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said in August during a call with investors to discuss the company’s quarterly results."
"Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said the ad-supported versions of their streaming platforms generate more money per user than their ad-free counterparts, as the advertising revenue more than offsets the lower subscription cost." -- https://www.wsj.com/business/media/netflix-price-increase-ac...
You end up paying in three ways: (1) money (subscription fees), (2) data (you're forced to log in and allow tracking), and (3) the decrease in attention/focus caused by advertising.
All three prices can be ratcheted up over time mostly independently of each other. Price increases in (2) and (3) are largely invisible to the user.
The only way out of this is to find a way to make ads not make as much money. Something like a consumer union but we attempt to organize to reduce the ROI for advertising. Boycott things you see ads for, purchase fewer things overall, and of course, relentlessly block ads.
The sad reality is that consumers are ever more spineless. This particular kind of rip-off started years ago when cable companies got away with charging for ad-riddled channels that used to be part of "basic cable."
Amazon will probably get away with this, just as Apple got away with removing the headphone jack from its best-selling music player. Watch apologists fall all over themselves to excuse it, and attack those of us who decry rip-offs like it.
"You're posting too fast. Please slow down"
Then WHY WAS THE REPLY BUTTON ENABLED? There is no excuse for this rudeness. Why are we expected to put up with it, year after year after year? Deliberately stealing from users is NOT OK, EVER. Why does HN do it?
Torrent system is alive and well. Mega shout out to seedhost.eu for their one-button panel for everything.
VLC will even open media over http, so one doesn't even have to mirror it locally from the Netherlands (although I do for the kids content, just to provide them a curated selection).
With prices of all streaming crawling upwards, and often multiple services being required to cover the catalog of what you want to watch, purchasing† has become a compelling option again. Realistically, if you're paying for Netflix, Prime, and Disney+, you're looking at a $45/mo bill. With seasons of shows costing around $10-15 to buy, are you better off with streaming? I personally don't watch more than a full season of a show in any given month, and I've just started considering this. One notable benefit - most streaming providers have a larger digital catalog for purchasing than for streaming, meaning you can centralize more.
The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds).
Personally, I cancelled all my subscriptions (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV+, Hulu, HIDIVE, AMC+) this christmas and reverted to piracy.
Modern piracy (the so called *ARR stack) provide UX that is pretty close to what you get from streaming services. In some cases even better - now I will use just one app on my TV to watch everything, will not be affected by Netflix/Prime/Apple/Hulu or internet provider outages when I am watching a movie or TV show, and will not have to go through 4 or 5 apps when I am searching for something specific to watch.
The UX is slightly worse when I find a movie or TV show via Plex Discovery and want to watch it immediately, since I will have to wait for *ARR to pick it up and download it, but for now I have quite a few TV shows to finish watching before it will become an inconvenience for me, especially given the fact that this stack can subscribe to upcoming shows - I can tell it that I am interested in Fallout for example, and it will monitor releases and download the show once it will become available.
I’m back to buying physical media for exactly these reasons. It’s unfortunate that a lot of things aren’t getting physical media releases these days, or are still only getting dvd releases, but even for Blu-ray the quality is far superior to streaming in most cases, and 4K is even better. Since we’ve started migrating to physical media we no longer have to worry about streaming ability, losing our license to a show, or even network outages.
It seems that it's going to end up as it ended up with music and books.
Buy a season of a show (an album, a book) digitally to indicate your support and help keep it running. Then pirate and keep a local copy of the same to ensure against future unavailability, and for more convenience.
I bet enough people in the media industry understand this mechanics, and sort of turn a blind eye at it, because it's not affecting their bottom line materially.
I just noticed that complete series of shows can be fairly cheap. I was in Best Buy and happened to walk by the DVD section for example and saw the complete "How I Met Your Mother" in a 28 disc boxed set for $32.99.
Unfortunately the world of DVD and Blu-ray seems to be overrun with too many editions. For example besides that particular HIMYM set (here it is at Amazon [1]), there is also this one [2] which is $49.99.
The pictures for the two look identical. But the release date listed for the $32.99 is about 9 months later, and the media format descriptions differ between the two. The $32.99 one says Subtitled, NTSC. The $49.99 one says NTSC, Widescreen, Box set, Subtitles, AC-3, Dolby. The $32.99 lists language as "English (Dolby Surround)" so does apparently have Dolby. The $49.99 one doesn't list language. The $32.99 one says it has English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The $49.99 just says French and Spanish subtitles. Does one of them have better sound? Do either of them have commentary, deleted scenes, or other special features. Does only the $49.99 have widescreen?
Some comments mention that there is commentary, but (1) Amazon considers these two sets to be variations on the same set and so they share comments, so there is no way to tell which set the comment is talking about, and (2) some of those comments are from several years before either set was released--they were definitely commenting about HIMYM so my guess is that they were for early releases of specific seasons or something like that.
If I were interested in buying that complete HIMYM I'd have no idea from those Amazon listings and comments which set to buy.
I've also seen similar things when considering buying movies. There will often be one or more of a DVD, a DVD + digital code, a Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, and probably some that I've forgotten.
Online listings often don't say if the digital code is for 4K, and often don't say much about special features. It is confusing enough that my impulse to buy the movie does not last long enough for me to figure out which to buy.
That’s my thinking as well. Renting a movie or buying it off AppleTV or other store ends up way cheaper than letting a subscription sit no matter if I need it or not
I rarely ever watch anything twice so I’m fully ok with renting and be done with it
The Amazon video experience has gotten bad. You use to be able to do a 'free for me'. Now it is a mix of 'free', ads, and rentals - combined with the netflix style of showing categories of content, highlighting the same shows, obscuring how much content is actually there.
I cancelled Prime when they removed the "free to me" option. They basically turned half of the video catalog pages into ads, the same as their shopping search result pages.
It was simple not so long ago. You either buy stuff or pirate it. Then everything moved to the subscription model. You don’t own what you’ve bought anymore. And now you have to watch ads while being a paying customer. It feels like pirating was a better option all this time.
The only “store” I really use nowadays is Bandcamp.
Steam has been pretty good to me over the years for gaming. It took a long time to build up trust to buy digital-only copies of games, but they've been reliable. Even with my trust in that delivery method losing a lot of it's allure lately, it's one of the few digital storefronts I feel any kind of trust in.
And then there's GOG, which I have less experience with, but they were good, too, while I used 'em. They don't offer a Proton/WINE compatibility layer for Linux like Steam does, so I kind of stopped getting stuff there once I switched away from Windows a couple years ago. (Ironically, Linux drove me away from a DRM-free storefront, but here we are.)
Meanwhile, the usability of pirate tools is improving. There's a number of "seed box" providers that put a decent management UI on top of the various pieces you need. And ways to see what's trending (or search the catalog) on Prime, Netflix, Max, etc, and add it to your download queue. A hosted service also trades a fair amount of hassle for a few extra dollars a month.
You don't even need a seed box. You can use a debrid service, like realdebrid or alldebrid to upload the magnet, then download from their site. Costs about $3 per month and you won't get a nastygram from your cable company.
1. I absolutely will not watch videos with commercial breaks.
2. The Prime shipping logo on an item no longer necessarily means 2-day, but frequently means whenever convenient for Amazon.
3. Anecdotally, customer service changes since Bezos handed over the reins have seemed mixed (some bad, some good).
Looks like I'm going to cancel my 14.99/month Prime membership, and return to Netflix. Which will also make purchases at Amazon and WFM less attractive.
Edit: I just canceled Amazon Prime. I figured that canceling was more meaningful than merely mumbling on the Internet that I might.
Essentially everything Amazon does today costs too much and doesn’t deliver the quality it once did. In my area, Prime delivery usually takes about a week. I live in a large US city. Their book recommendations system has become garbage. Prices are escalating across the board. That is the cost of a monopoly.
More and more of their offering has been moving to their Freevee ad tier, anyway.
And if they run the Prime tier ads like they've been running the Freevee tier ads, for me, that means "forget about it".
Freevee ads, last time I could bring myself to try a show on it, are copious, inserted willy-nilly into the show often at very awkward and disruptive moments, with no forewarning... AND, the quality of the ads and their copy/content is crap. Not just lots of very disruptive ads, but offensive ones.
Louis Rossman has a recent YouTube video on the severely declining quality of the physical products you find on (U.S.) Amazon. It really helped crystallize for me in my own mind what's been happening there. He can't find a decent electrical butt joint to, well, as you see from his demonstration, potentially save his life (versus the Chinese crap e.g. starting a fire that takes it).
This move is just one more step -- far down the road -- towards Amazon becoming an outright sewer.
I'm supposed to pay $130 ($150?...) a year, for THIS?!
(And by the way, 2 day delivery is a farce now. A few things are quicker, and many are... the opposite.)
Anyway, I'm looking at a set of "Magnum PI" DVD's I just picked up used, because Freevee has had the streaming rights bound up for the last year or a bit more, and I literally cannot watch the show together with their ads. I'll take the downgrade in image quality over putting up with them.
Oh, and if you want Magnum on Blu-ray? You have to pony up the better part of $200 for one of the remaining European box sets. Then purchase a "gray" modded Blu-ray player. Or rip them. Or... that other thing.
F--- the entire "entertainment industry". Once it transitions from creativity to the intellectual property portion of its function, it's just a monster.
P.S. Although I don't regularly survey all the offerings, the only ad-based streaming whose ad delivery I've been able to tolerate is Tubi. They've been increasing the quantity of ads -- sigh -- but you still get a 10 second warning, and the ads I see largely I do not find comparatively offensive. (And those shite/exploitative online gambling ads seem to be in decline -- yay!)
Plus, Tubi overall has a comparable if not better catalog, these days.
So maybe I'll just tell Amazon to stuff it. If I'm going to have ads, Tubi does that better, anyway. (Although I do hate making Fox, now its owner, any money, even such indirect, advertising-based money.)
Prime Video has near 0 value in Europe, because they have almost no content. The only reason it 'lives' imho is that it is bundled with Prime delivery.
I have noticed that I no longer order much from Amazon because of the rampant fake product problem that arised from SKU pooling.
I just went to my account settings and turned on the 'warn me 3 days before renewing'. If they go true with these adds over here, it will be the straw that broke the camel's back for me. And to be fair, unless I see some huge video catalog improvement on some change in SKU pooling so I can trust buying again, they loose my sub anyways.
With these quality degradations from streaming providers and content removal of "purchased" items due to licensing changes, I feel like we're going to see piracy make a comeback.
I wish there was an easy way to digitize large libraries of physical media. Doing it manually is way too much of a chore to bother.
Hopefully they don't make the dogs breakfast that is Hulu -- there you can have a subscription "without ads" but then they show you adds on some content. There's no logic to determine which content gets ads and which doesn't, nor can you tell if you would be just as well off not subscribing to the no-ads level since you can't tell how many (if any) additional adds that would generate.
Unfortunately, too many people in America are just indifferent to sacrificing their attention to ads.
I see it in my parents/siblings when I visit. An ad that would have me immediately grasping a remote, doesn't even make them budget. They watch it, consider it, and move on.
All these companies have figured out that they can boil the frog and not enough people make enough of a stink for them to care. So they'll keep cramming ads down everyone's throats, because they've got a monopoly on the content.
I think we've largely forgotten what live over-the-air television was like for quite a few decades: TV shows and movies split up by blocks of 5-6 30 second ads, including ads for other shows later in the week. We'd either sit through them, bored, or find something else to do. (Or pause recording on the VCR. Heh.)
Hell, they'd even show a bumper with the title of the show sometimes just to break up the large chunk of ads.
Once we got a taste of what it was like to NOT have ads, and have more control over what/when we watch... boy did they screw themselves. I can't enjoy OTA television anymore. Both the nearly nonstop ads, and the "appointment television" necessity if you don't have a DVR.
But at least on OTA television, the ads at least had some kind of quality control (at least back in the day). All the ads (or 'sponsored content') I see on YouTube and friends are some of the most disgusting garbage.
And now ATSC 3.0 is introducing paid paywalls for BROADCAST TELEVISION. So even OTA television is about to pass the enshitification red line.
Add in the decline of physical media sales, and... well, there's some dark days ahead, and you can thank shortsighted greed for it.
Cable TV once had the same allure: Freedom from ads. It was even hard to explain kids 10 years ago, at a time when kids still watched cable, that there was once a time when cable TV didn't have ads.
> It was even hard to explain kids 10 years ago, at a time when kids still watched cable, that there was once a time when cable TV didn't have ads.
One thing that may have made this difficult is that, in fact, there was never a time when cable didn't have ads. It was invented to deliver standard (advertising laden) TV to places geographically out-of-reach of broadcast, and basic cable always was a mix of broadcast stations and additional ad-laden stations.
Premium cable channels didn't tend to have advertising except for their own (or shared corporate parent) programming, but those were charged additionally on top of basic cable.
As someone who had cable since the mid-1980s, its been really weird to see this recent invention of a lost past where cable existed but was ad-free.
I once had someone correct me and say cable also has ads. I had to look it up and sure enough, it apparently does now.
I have not carried cable since Cox wouldn't allow me to watch the sci-fi channel without renting hardware per month (the refused to let me purchase the box outright).
I stopped pirating when netflix started streaming, but now I'm back to pirating because fuck these greedy bastards.
I still get a handful of semi premium channels without commercials, and I don't even pay extra for the HBO tier.
Cable TV commercials are now the best option we have though, because they can be trivially skipped. A DVR still gives me full control of the video stream. If you time shift you never have to see an unskippable commercial on cable.
Which is just another way of saying that tech companies brought us enshittification faster and more thoroughly than what they supplanted.
I can download whatever I want, in a world wide scope, for free, with no DRM shit. And no ads or other onerous garbage bolted on.
And I keep what I download, rather than "stream" (download every time, with no ability to save).
So this 'pay more for less'? Nah, y'all pushing me to piracy. And I have NO problems doing it. And no, I'm not going to pay $150/no for streaming crap that I end up with nothing when I cancel.
Amazon needs something sticky included in prime. An email or very generous photo storage. This is what keeps many people stuck with Gmail and outlook.
Else amazon is soon going to see huge drop in prime subscribers.
From the comments here, looks like fast shipping and streaming are not sticky enough for most people.
Fast shipping and streaming were plenty sticky for me. I'm aware that Prime offers various other benefits, but I never cared about them at all. I paid for Prime for very many years and considered it a good value.
But their shipping has slowed considerably, and I'm in the no-ads-ever club, so they've lost me as a customer.
They saw a year over year drop in Prime subscribers in Q1 2023. I completely agree, but that "sticky" thing could also be improving the Prime shopping experience.
I got sick of seeing things on Amazon listed for one price without Prime shipping and a higher price with Prime shipping.
Amazon prime became worthless to me around 2018. I'm surprised anyone still gets value out of it. For those that do, maybe this isn't a big deal. I care much more about how bad and confusing their selection is, dodgy marketplace sellers, and almost everything cheap being not eligible for prime than I do about this.
Amazon of the "prime" example of a new-er tech company that bought their way into a monopoly and they used it to gouge people while providing bad service. Uber being the other obvious one.
My XP has been very different. I rarely find an item I want to buy that is not covered by prime.
As for video specifically, I mostly watch older shows from the 80s and 90s. Do they have everything I'd like to watch? No, but there is enough to watch an episode a few times a week.
However, I won't pay this additional fee and I'll cancel after they show me the 1st ad.
[+] [-] linsomniac|2 years ago|reply
I have mixed feelings already about Prime Video, as a watching experience I find it quite annoying because I'll find a movie I'd like to watch only to find I have to pay another $5 to watch it. With the other services, I know if a movie comes up on the display, I can watch it without further cost.
I'm fairly sensitive to adverts, I really don't like seeing them, largely because I've isolated myself from them. The fewer you see, the more unsettling they are, the blatant attractive factor of them, do.not.want. And anther $40/yr is too much.
Apparently, dropping Prime with the shopping really does not impact the speed of delivery or cost. I'm already often selecting delayed delivery. With the increased prices, it's hard to justify the $140/yr.
[+] [-] woodruffw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksherlock|2 years ago|reply
"“We’re obviously trying with our pricing strategy to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier,” Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said in August during a call with investors to discuss the company’s quarterly results."
"Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said the ad-supported versions of their streaming platforms generate more money per user than their ad-free counterparts, as the advertising revenue more than offsets the lower subscription cost." -- https://www.wsj.com/business/media/netflix-price-increase-ac...
"Netflix executives have said that the ad tier brings in more average revenue per user than its $15.49 standard plan." -- https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-reworks-microsoft-pact-...
[+] [-] ants_everywhere|2 years ago|reply
All three prices can be ratcheted up over time mostly independently of each other. Price increases in (2) and (3) are largely invisible to the user.
[+] [-] ajkjk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShadowBanThis01|2 years ago|reply
Amazon will probably get away with this, just as Apple got away with removing the headphone jack from its best-selling music player. Watch apologists fall all over themselves to excuse it, and attack those of us who decry rip-offs like it.
"You're posting too fast. Please slow down"
Then WHY WAS THE REPLY BUTTON ENABLED? There is no excuse for this rudeness. Why are we expected to put up with it, year after year after year? Deliberately stealing from users is NOT OK, EVER. Why does HN do it?
[+] [-] dehrmann|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiroiuma|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rokkitmensch|2 years ago|reply
VLC will even open media over http, so one doesn't even have to mirror it locally from the Netherlands (although I do for the kids content, just to provide them a curated selection).
[+] [-] jjcm|2 years ago|reply
The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds).
† or license leasing if you're buying digitally
†† ie https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6449826?sortBy=best
[+] [-] antonf|2 years ago|reply
Modern piracy (the so called *ARR stack) provide UX that is pretty close to what you get from streaming services. In some cases even better - now I will use just one app on my TV to watch everything, will not be affected by Netflix/Prime/Apple/Hulu or internet provider outages when I am watching a movie or TV show, and will not have to go through 4 or 5 apps when I am searching for something specific to watch.
The UX is slightly worse when I find a movie or TV show via Plex Discovery and want to watch it immediately, since I will have to wait for *ARR to pick it up and download it, but for now I have quite a few TV shows to finish watching before it will become an inconvenience for me, especially given the fact that this stack can subscribe to upcoming shows - I can tell it that I am interested in Fallout for example, and it will monitor releases and download the show once it will become available.
[+] [-] rebeccaskinner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|2 years ago|reply
Buy a season of a show (an album, a book) digitally to indicate your support and help keep it running. Then pirate and keep a local copy of the same to ensure against future unavailability, and for more convenience.
I bet enough people in the media industry understand this mechanics, and sort of turn a blind eye at it, because it's not affecting their bottom line materially.
[+] [-] mynameisnoone|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedunangst|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the world of DVD and Blu-ray seems to be overrun with too many editions. For example besides that particular HIMYM set (here it is at Amazon [1]), there is also this one [2] which is $49.99.
The pictures for the two look identical. But the release date listed for the $32.99 is about 9 months later, and the media format descriptions differ between the two. The $32.99 one says Subtitled, NTSC. The $49.99 one says NTSC, Widescreen, Box set, Subtitles, AC-3, Dolby. The $32.99 lists language as "English (Dolby Surround)" so does apparently have Dolby. The $49.99 one doesn't list language. The $32.99 one says it has English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The $49.99 just says French and Spanish subtitles. Does one of them have better sound? Do either of them have commentary, deleted scenes, or other special features. Does only the $49.99 have widescreen?
Some comments mention that there is commentary, but (1) Amazon considers these two sets to be variations on the same set and so they share comments, so there is no way to tell which set the comment is talking about, and (2) some of those comments are from several years before either set was released--they were definitely commenting about HIMYM so my guess is that they were for early releases of specific seasons or something like that.
If I were interested in buying that complete HIMYM I'd have no idea from those Amazon listings and comments which set to buy.
I've also seen similar things when considering buying movies. There will often be one or more of a DVD, a DVD + digital code, a Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, and probably some that I've forgotten.
Online listings often don't say if the digital code is for 4K, and often don't say much about special features. It is confusing enough that my impulse to buy the movie does not last long enough for me to figure out which to buy.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Met-Your-Mother-Complete/dp/B07GJ...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/How-Met-Your-Mother-Complete/dp/B0747...
[+] [-] rdl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smugma|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artdigital|2 years ago|reply
I rarely ever watch anything twice so I’m fully ok with renting and be done with it
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] heelix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtallis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rckt|2 years ago|reply
The only “store” I really use nowadays is Bandcamp.
[+] [-] fortyseven|2 years ago|reply
And then there's GOG, which I have less experience with, but they were good, too, while I used 'em. They don't offer a Proton/WINE compatibility layer for Linux like Steam does, so I kind of stopped getting stuff there once I switched away from Windows a couple years ago. (Ironically, Linux drove me away from a DRM-free storefront, but here we are.)
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
And now that Bandcamp has been bought out it's only a matter of time before the experience there becomes crappy as well.
[+] [-] tyingq|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insickness|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
2. The Prime shipping logo on an item no longer necessarily means 2-day, but frequently means whenever convenient for Amazon.
3. Anecdotally, customer service changes since Bezos handed over the reins have seemed mixed (some bad, some good).
Looks like I'm going to cancel my 14.99/month Prime membership, and return to Netflix. Which will also make purchases at Amazon and WFM less attractive.
Edit: I just canceled Amazon Prime. I figured that canceling was more meaningful than merely mumbling on the Internet that I might.
[+] [-] Blackstrat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbnjeh|2 years ago|reply
And if they run the Prime tier ads like they've been running the Freevee tier ads, for me, that means "forget about it".
Freevee ads, last time I could bring myself to try a show on it, are copious, inserted willy-nilly into the show often at very awkward and disruptive moments, with no forewarning... AND, the quality of the ads and their copy/content is crap. Not just lots of very disruptive ads, but offensive ones.
Louis Rossman has a recent YouTube video on the severely declining quality of the physical products you find on (U.S.) Amazon. It really helped crystallize for me in my own mind what's been happening there. He can't find a decent electrical butt joint to, well, as you see from his demonstration, potentially save his life (versus the Chinese crap e.g. starting a fire that takes it).
This move is just one more step -- far down the road -- towards Amazon becoming an outright sewer.
I'm supposed to pay $130 ($150?...) a year, for THIS?!
(And by the way, 2 day delivery is a farce now. A few things are quicker, and many are... the opposite.)
Anyway, I'm looking at a set of "Magnum PI" DVD's I just picked up used, because Freevee has had the streaming rights bound up for the last year or a bit more, and I literally cannot watch the show together with their ads. I'll take the downgrade in image quality over putting up with them.
Oh, and if you want Magnum on Blu-ray? You have to pony up the better part of $200 for one of the remaining European box sets. Then purchase a "gray" modded Blu-ray player. Or rip them. Or... that other thing.
F--- the entire "entertainment industry". Once it transitions from creativity to the intellectual property portion of its function, it's just a monster.
P.S. Although I don't regularly survey all the offerings, the only ad-based streaming whose ad delivery I've been able to tolerate is Tubi. They've been increasing the quantity of ads -- sigh -- but you still get a 10 second warning, and the ads I see largely I do not find comparatively offensive. (And those shite/exploitative online gambling ads seem to be in decline -- yay!)
Plus, Tubi overall has a comparable if not better catalog, these days.
So maybe I'll just tell Amazon to stuff it. If I'm going to have ads, Tubi does that better, anyway. (Although I do hate making Fox, now its owner, any money, even such indirect, advertising-based money.)
[+] [-] PeterStuer|2 years ago|reply
I have noticed that I no longer order much from Amazon because of the rampant fake product problem that arised from SKU pooling.
I just went to my account settings and turned on the 'warn me 3 days before renewing'. If they go true with these adds over here, it will be the straw that broke the camel's back for me. And to be fair, unless I see some huge video catalog improvement on some change in SKU pooling so I can trust buying again, they loose my sub anyways.
[+] [-] nullfield|2 years ago|reply
I specifically go out of the way to get "sold-from/shipped-by Amazon", but I don't know if that's enough to save me...
[+] [-] bilalq|2 years ago|reply
I wish there was an easy way to digitize large libraries of physical media. Doing it manually is way too much of a chore to bother.
[+] [-] dboreham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shartshooter|2 years ago|reply
I see it in my parents/siblings when I visit. An ad that would have me immediately grasping a remote, doesn't even make them budget. They watch it, consider it, and move on.
All these companies have figured out that they can boil the frog and not enough people make enough of a stink for them to care. So they'll keep cramming ads down everyone's throats, because they've got a monopoly on the content.
[+] [-] sentientslug|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortyseven|2 years ago|reply
Hell, they'd even show a bumper with the title of the show sometimes just to break up the large chunk of ads.
Once we got a taste of what it was like to NOT have ads, and have more control over what/when we watch... boy did they screw themselves. I can't enjoy OTA television anymore. Both the nearly nonstop ads, and the "appointment television" necessity if you don't have a DVR.
But at least on OTA television, the ads at least had some kind of quality control (at least back in the day). All the ads (or 'sponsored content') I see on YouTube and friends are some of the most disgusting garbage.
And now ATSC 3.0 is introducing paid paywalls for BROADCAST TELEVISION. So even OTA television is about to pass the enshitification red line.
Add in the decline of physical media sales, and... well, there's some dark days ahead, and you can thank shortsighted greed for it.
[+] [-] bestes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elzbardico|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
One thing that may have made this difficult is that, in fact, there was never a time when cable didn't have ads. It was invented to deliver standard (advertising laden) TV to places geographically out-of-reach of broadcast, and basic cable always was a mix of broadcast stations and additional ad-laden stations.
Premium cable channels didn't tend to have advertising except for their own (or shared corporate parent) programming, but those were charged additionally on top of basic cable.
As someone who had cable since the mid-1980s, its been really weird to see this recent invention of a lost past where cable existed but was ad-free.
[+] [-] PH95VuimJjqBqy|2 years ago|reply
I have not carried cable since Cox wouldn't allow me to watch the sci-fi channel without renting hardware per month (the refused to let me purchase the box outright).
I stopped pirating when netflix started streaming, but now I'm back to pirating because fuck these greedy bastards.
Piracy is a market force.
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|2 years ago|reply
Cable TV commercials are now the best option we have though, because they can be trivially skipped. A DVR still gives me full control of the video stream. If you time shift you never have to see an unskippable commercial on cable.
Which is just another way of saying that tech companies brought us enshittification faster and more thoroughly than what they supplanted.
[+] [-] irajdeep|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pierat|2 years ago|reply
I can download whatever I want, in a world wide scope, for free, with no DRM shit. And no ads or other onerous garbage bolted on.
And I keep what I download, rather than "stream" (download every time, with no ability to save).
So this 'pay more for less'? Nah, y'all pushing me to piracy. And I have NO problems doing it. And no, I'm not going to pay $150/no for streaming crap that I end up with nothing when I cancel.
So, yeah. I pirate.
[+] [-] nmridul|2 years ago|reply
From the comments here, looks like fast shipping and streaming are not sticky enough for most people.
[+] [-] mr_machine|2 years ago|reply
But their shipping has slowed considerably, and I'm in the no-ads-ever club, so they've lost me as a customer.
[+] [-] aimor|2 years ago|reply
I got sick of seeing things on Amazon listed for one price without Prime shipping and a higher price with Prime shipping.
[+] [-] andy99|2 years ago|reply
Amazon of the "prime" example of a new-er tech company that bought their way into a monopoly and they used it to gouge people while providing bad service. Uber being the other obvious one.
[+] [-] dudul|2 years ago|reply
As for video specifically, I mostly watch older shows from the 80s and 90s. Do they have everything I'd like to watch? No, but there is enough to watch an episode a few times a week.
However, I won't pay this additional fee and I'll cancel after they show me the 1st ad.